Suburban snapshots

German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski’s series on Mumbai’s suburbs has a melancholic bass line.

Somehow, Mumbai has always been the place for him, says Peter Bialobrzeski. “I’ve been to India about sixteen times, since I first came here as a young backpacker in 1987,” says the German photographer. “My Mumbai friends keep joking: You must have lived in Mumbai in a previous life.”

Bialobrzeski’s photographs are at the moment on display at the Max Mueller Bhavan. His camera has framed many rising Asian cities such as Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, warts and all, and now it is Mumbai’s turn. Bialobrzeski is especially fond of the Colaba of the late 1980s. He still remembers the hippy-esque feeling of being a young German in a tropical city by the sea. But his current exhibition does not focus on Colaba, or any of Mumbai’s other Instagram-worthy neighbourhoods. Instead, it was the city’s chaotic suburbs that he wanted to document when he arrived here last year.

Malls all over the country are struggling to survive. But as some successful ones in the city have shown, retail hubs need to look beyond shopping and reinvent themselves as community spaces.

Like the other megacities he has chronicled, Bialobrzeski sees Mumbai as one big urban organism, and not a city where one discerns landmarks and quarters. And he wants the spectator to see his works as one big composition.

(L) Peter Bialobrzeski

Looking at the large scale photos, one gets a strange impression of calmness, very different from what one experiences when actually walking around in Andheri, Bandra, or Jogeshwari. A silent barber tending to a customer in the middle of the road, with a new, glossy high rise in the background; a home built right on the edge of a steep slope, with a little girl and a man in front of it. They are almost invisible. One has to look closely at Bialobrzeski’s photographs to spot the people in them.

Bialobrzeski, 57, started his career as a photographer for a local newspaper in his hometown, Wolfsburg, a small, grey, industrial town in northern Germany, internationally known for one big name: Volkswagen. Towns like Wolfsburg were developed first and foremost for business — humans came later — and this is one phenomenon that he regularly reflects in his work. He is a huge fan of the movie Bladerunner and the dark, overwhelming architecture featured in it. In his Mumbai series, he is not focussing on humans, but on their buildings. Ugly ones, one might think at first sight. But he disagrees. “I don’t make these kind of judgments when I take a photo“, Bialobrzeski says. “You, as the one who looks at the building, can say: This is an ugly building! But the photo itself is not ugly. I want to show things and by showing them, make people discuss.”

In his Mumbai series, he shows the close juxtaposition of shanties, modest little houses and newly built skyspcrapers in suburbs like Bandra and Andheri. An international coffee chain, with its shining glass front, looks like a spaceship that has just landed during rush hour. “I am fascinated by Mumbai’s contradictions“, Biaolbrzeski says. “There is a certain mixture of hard and soft in the city that inspires me.” A mixture one would not easily find in places like Hamburg, Germany’s well off harbourcity where Bialobrzeski is based now.

In ‘Mumbai Suburbia’, people play a secondary role. The physical structures in the frame take centerstage, with people providing the context

Like Indian cities, Germany’s biggest cities, Berlin, Hamburg and Munich, are growing, too. More and more people are moving into the country’s metropolises, there is a heated debate going on about land use, rising rents, growing commuter traffic and air pollution. But the way German cities grow is very different from Mumbai’s growth. New quarters in Berlin or Munich are neatly planned, and the middle class and the poor, most of the time, live clearly separated from each other. Contrary to this, Bialobrzeski notes, one can step out of a luxurious building in Mumbai to find the shanties of the people who work in this building right next to it.

Bialobrzeski’s photos of the city’s suburbs encourage the viewer to see beyond the superficiality of the scene being depicted, and thereby aims at transforming what may be a familiar scene into something new or unexpected

Bialobrzeski has also done series of photographs where he looks at the suburban edges of Germany’s cities. There is less density, more greenery, there are just simply fewer buildings in them. Still there is something that binds them with his portraits of Mumbai’s suburbs: “I have a certain bass line in my work, and that is melancholy,” he says. Like in his photos from Bandra and Andheri, the people in Bialobrzeski’s German suburbs look tiny, lost, and with no place to go. Heimat, the German word for home or homeland and sense of belonging, is another topic Bialobrzeski is very interested in. One can see both in his photos of Mumbai’s suburbs: Places that seem, at least to a foreigner’s eyes, impossible to live in. And stubborn people who cling to these places and have somehow managed to make them their own.

Mumbai Suburbia: Urban Environment in Crisis is on till November at the Max Mueller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda

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